We (advisors) took a small group of our ambulance corps youth squad members to the Liberty Science Center this past week. Liberty Science Center has a terrific teaching center and one of the features available is an Interactive Surgery – through video conferencing participants get to sit in on a LIVE surgery, listen to the conversation in the O.R. and ask the surgeon and anesthesiologist questions. 
Through cameras, participants get to see exactly what is going on in the operating room including the actual surgery. It was a marvelous experience and our kids (ages 14-18) really got a lot out of it – in emergency response we see the exterior of the body and the trauma from the outside in. Witnessing this surgery and actually getting to see the heart beating with the vessels, etc. lends so much to understanding.
Because of the patient’s total health, we also got to see exactly how “life” affects the overall health of the heart, sometimes complicating it or damaging it beyond repair. The surgical team had to make decisions and revise their methods when they found surprises and worse conditions than they had prepared for.
I write about the heart in my books – not the surgical kind (although in Courage of the Heart our heroine did have a heart condition), but the heart of romance and passion. For medical considerations, the lifestyle, gender, age and heredity have major affects on the heart. In novels like mine (romantic suspense) the character’s history and experiences can leave scars that the new love must find a way to mend.
In Bartlett’s Rule, the heroine’s life of abuse and rape left her unable to trust her own heart and judgment much less trust the man who fell in love with her. The hero’s loss of conscious memory in Forgotten didn’t seem to adversely affect his heart’s memory or change his love for his young wife. And in Within the Law one character suffered a tragic loss of the fiancé he loved while the other had to overcome the feeling of betrayal by her ex-husband making them an unlikely pair.
Final Sin is not a romantic suspense but the heart was doubly important there as a killer looked to silence several including the heart of the woman that the hero loved.
“Love heals all wounds” is an overused cliché. Sometimes the damage is too great, sometimes we have to find a way to “bypass” those scars. Like the surgeon who changed his planned procedure when he found that the patient would not fare well, the characters in my books often have to change their dreams and attitudes in order to make their romance work. Sometimes they make mistakes – fortunately the surgeon didn’t.
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Hope you will come to meet me at this Multi-Author Booksigning
Wednesday, July 08, 7:00 PM
Barnes & Noble Booksellers - Palisades
4416 Palisades Center Drive,
West Nyack, NY 10994
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